Police say they’ve cracked rape case columnist deemed a hoax

By COLLEEN LONGJanuary 9, 2018

This Sept. 29, 2016 photo provided by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision shows James Edward Webb, a serial rapist serving 75 years to life in prison. Police say they have new DNA tests linking Webb with the 1994 rape of a 21-year old woman in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in New York. (New York State Department of Corrections via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — Detectives said Tuesday they have cracked a 1994 rape case that an acclaimed newspaper columnist infamously claimed was a hoax.

Police recently informed the victim that DNA collected after the attack on her had been matched to a serial rapist already in prison for other crimes. It’s unclear whether he can be charged now because of the statute of limitations, but the breakthrough was vindication for the woman.

She told police she was walking home with groceries through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on April 26, 1994, when she was dragged into the bushes and raped. Her detailed description of her attacker allowed police to release a sketch, and DNA evidence was recovered, but no arrests were made.

Daily News columnist Mike McAlary wrote at the time that he heard from unnamed police sources that the woman invented her story because she wanted to bolster a speech she was to give at a rally about violence against lesbians.

“The woman, who will probably end up being arrested herself, invented the crime, they said, to promote her rally,” McAlary wrote in a column called “Rape hoax the real crime.”

He persisted even after DNA was discovered, writing three columns. The last column’s headline was: “I’m right, but that’s no reason to cheer.”

The woman sued McAlary for libel, but a judge dismissed the case in part because McAlary had been relying on information from police. An attorney who represented the Daily News and McAlary said then McAlary’s reporting had been “vindicated” and it was police who “got some stuff wrong.” McAlary died in 1998 at age 41.

The woman’s attorney, Martin Garbus, said Tuesday she’s owed apologies from the Daily News and the police department.

“This is a woman who had to live for 23 years with a false accusation of lying, with threats to the newspaper that she was about to be arrested,” Garbus said. “It’s horrific.”

The Daily News didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said the woman wept when detectives recently told her they’d found a DNA match in her rape case.

He said cold-case detectives have been going through unsolved stranger rapes. He said the DNA recovered in 1994 was mixed with the victim’s DNA and there was no way at the time to subtract it. But police asked her for a sample and were able to isolate hers using modern methods, leaving them with a hit.

Boyce said detectives matched the DNA to serial rapist James Edward Webb, who’s serving 75 years to life in prison.

Webb had been charged with 10 other rapes over several decades. He was arrested in 1995 on a separate rape. He told police he denied raping the woman in the 1994 case. It’s unclear whether he was considered a suspect back then.

Boyce said he wasn’t involved in the 1994 case and couldn’t comment on how it was handled by police, other than to say the woman had been treated badly.

William Bratton, who was police commissioner at the time, apologized to the woman for the leak in the days after the McAlary column was published.

The case was mentioned in “Lucky Guy,” a 2013 Broadway play about McAlary by the late writer Nora Ephron. The play starred Tom Hanks as McAlary, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns on white police officers who assaulted a black Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, in a Brooklyn police station in 1997.

The controversy over McAlary’s rape hoax columns also involved John Miller, then the police department’s main spokesman and now its head of counterterrorism and intelligence, who was rumored to be one of McAlary’s sources.

During sworn questioning in the woman’s libel lawsuit, Miller said he told McAlary and other reporters that detectives had doubts about her case because of inconsistences in her story and a lack of physical evidence, according to a New York Times article at the time. Miller said McAlary also had other police sources telling him they had doubts.

Miller had no comment Tuesday other than to refer to the deposition.

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Associated Press writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to show the sentence is 75 years, not 25 years.